Simply Secure's Growing Team

Happy Spring! Like so much in the northern hemisphere, our blog and Twitter
stream have been largely dormant for a while – but we’ve been behind the scenes
getting ready for a season of tremendous growth. Since we announced Simply
Secure in the fall, we’ve become formally established as a legal entity,
interviewed and hired an exceptional staff, and fleshed out our plans for
partnering with open-source organizations to make secure-communication tools
more usable. We’ll tell you more about what we’re working on in future blog
posts, but today I’d like to introduce you to our two awesome new staff
members: Ame Elliott, our Design Director, and Nóirín Plunkett,
our Operations Manager.

Ame Elliott comes from global design consultancy IDEO, where she led Design
Research for Fortune 500 clients. She holds a Ph.D. in Design Theory and
Methods, and has spent her career creating and developing Human-Centered Design
techniques, which ensure that the resultant design responds to the needs of the
people who will engage with it, and not the other way around. This approach –
improving technology by focusing on users – is at the core of Simply Secure’s
mission, and we are ecstatic to have someone of Ame’s caliber applying these
principles to the secure-communications space.

Nóirín “Trouble” Plunkett is Simply Secure’s Archivist,
Historian, and Operations Manager. Trouble brings impeccable organization and
writing skills to this unusual role, along with deep experience in the open
source world by way of the Apache Software Foundation, Google, and the Ada
Initiative. As Operations Manager, they work to generally keep the ship that is
Simply Secure sailing smoothly. As Archivist and Historian, they will be
working to catalog (and make freely available to the public) resources to help
make usability and design an integral part of software development.

What is this excellent team up to? In a word, lots. In coming weeks we will
share more about some work Ame is doing (a “listening tour”) to learn about
where the design, software, and user communities stand in relation to current
secure-communication technology. This series of qualitative-research interviews
will provide a broad and deep review of the work being done, and help pinpoint
clear opportunities for us to make a serious impact. We’ll also tell you about
the ways in which we are hoping to collaborate with software partners to
improve their tools, and how to get involved. And, of course, we can’t wait to
introduce our inaugural group of Secure Usability Fellows!

Thank you for your interest and support while we’ve been getting up and
running. If you want to stay in touch as we start sharing out our work, please
sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, or drop us an email – more
info here!